Fallout 4 Review

Most of the way this huge roleplaying-shooter game works is carried over from its excellent predecessors, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It is the Skyrim to Fallout 3’s Oblivion, if you will – it iterates on the previous game’s already amazing systems, and it’s similarly dense with locations to explore, genuinely creepy monsters to fight, and superbly engrossing post-nuclear atmosphere that blends unsettling gore and death with dark comedy. After more than 55 hours played I may have seen an ending, yet I feel like I’ve only begun to explore its extraordinary world; from the look of it, I’ll easily be able to spend another 100 happy hours here and still see new and exciting things.

Watch the first 28 minutes of Fallout 4 above.

A story that begins as a basic search for your lost family evolves into something much more complex and morally nuanced. Like in Fallout: New Vegas, we’re drawn into a struggle between several groups competing for control of the region, and deciding which of their imperfect post-apocalyptic philosophies to align with made me pause to consider how I wanted events to play out. Even the highly questionable Institute has a tempting reason to side with them, and turning away from them in my playthrough wasn’t as clear-cut a choice as I’d expected. I was impressed by the sympathy shown toward the villains, too - even the most irredeemable murderer is explored and given a trace of humanity.

Mega(Bos)ton

Of course, as is the tradition with developer Bethesda Game Studios’ open-world RPGs, the main story isn’t nearly as gripping an attraction as the huge number of well-written side quests you’ll come across just by wandering through the ruins of the Boston area, now known as The Commonwealth. I found it difficult to complete even the most basic point-A-to-point-B task without being sidetracked at least twice by enticing detours. An abandoned comic book publisher office? How can I not explore it? Boston’s famous Fenway Park? Gotta see what’s become of that. A crumbling high school with heads on pikes outside? I bet there’s great loot in there! Practically tripping over new discoveries like this, I feel like a kid on Easter whose parents are bad at hiding the candy.

Exploration has its own rewards, as this is the most diverse Fallout world yet, with dilapidated urban areas, ominous dead forests, eerie swamps, a desolate area mired in a hellish radioactive haze, and even some areas that look borderline hospitable like beaches and budding farms. The Commonwealth’s much more color-saturated than Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland, though it has its fair share of grays and browns, and it shares New Vegas’ bright blue sky (as opposed to oppressive clouds) when it’s not night time or raining or green with a terrifying radiation storm. It’s often beautiful. Attention to detail is evident everywhere – Fallout 4 might not be a leader in all areas of graphics technology (character animations are still a weakness) but from the intricate Pip-Boy wrist-computer interface (which completely changes when you’re in power armor), to careful arrangement of skeletal remains that tell the tragically dark or tragically funny stories of long-dead characters, to tattered poster art on the walls, to even raindrops on your visor (if you’re wearing one) it’s consistently impressive.

Over Powered

Perhaps because this adventure is such a long haul, Fallout 4 is a bit overeager to hook us in the beginning. After a brief glimpse of pre-war life in Fallout’s familiar-but-strange near-future and a retelling of the events on the day the bombs fell in 2077, we barely have time to get our hands dirty in the post-apocalyptic era before Fallout 4 throws us into a big action moment: You’re given a suit of the big, stompy power armor and a heavy weapon, and put into an intense brawl against the series’ most iconic monster.

Above: Vault IGN discusses the first things we'll do in Fallout 4.

It’s certainly not an unconventional idea for a game with a long progression arc to give us an early taste of the powerful toys we’ll gain access to later in order to motivate us to work for them, but with Fallout it’s a misstep that trods on the series’ beloved feeling of working our way up from almost nothing to become the dominant force in the wasteland. This bothered me less and less as I began to explore, but knowing that armor was available when I wanted it made me a little cockier than I wanted to be when setting out into a hostile, unforgiving world.

It Builds Character

One of the first things a returning Fallout player will notice after creating a character with the intuitive push-and-pull face-sculpting tool is that the entire concepts of skill points and traits have been consumed by the perks system, unifying all character progression under one big, elaborately animated Vault Boy chart with so many unlockable options you have to scroll through them to see them all. While this streamlining does mean giving up a lot of minute control over where your character improves with each level, it also means the decision of what to do with the single point you get each level has a significant impact, and therefore those decisions represent a commitment and are tough to make: do you want to spend it on a new low-level perk, increase the level of an existing one, or pump it into a SPECIAL attribute like Luck to boost certain stats and also open up a new, more powerful perk, like the Mysterious Stranger, that you’ll be able to unlock with your next level?

These might be more general, jack-of-all-trades types than previous Fallout character builds, in that you generally don’t have any crippling deficiencies, but they definitely have their distinguishing features that’ll make one playthrough feel different from the next. And before you lament it as a “dumbing down” of Fallout’s overall complexity, turn your eye to the new crafting and equipment progression system, which has picked up the slack by becoming vastly more complicated and interesting.

One Man's Trash

As if I didn’t already have enough of a hoarding problem, Fallout 4’s crafting system gives even more motivation to compulsively collect everything that isn’t nailed down. It’s so easy, too - grabbing things out of containers happens quickly in window that pops up when you look over it. Every item in the world is made up of material components, most of which you can intuitively guess: bottles are needed for glass, a desk fan will provide you with steel and gears, and a roll of duct tape is worth its weight in gold. I once went on a desperate search for pencils so that I could extract the lead they contained to use for radiation shielding. (Apparently Fallout's alternate universe never switched to graphite.) Nothing is worthless junk, which means that managing the weight of your inventory is a constant series of agonizing decisions of what to take with you and what to leave behind.

The value of those materials comes from their use in the fantastic equipment upgrades, which give most guns you pick up extraordinary potential for flexibility and longevity. Stopping at a crafting bench with the right components in hand can turn a pistol into a short-range, pray-and-spray automatic or a scoped sniper with a long barrel for accuracy and a big stock to reduce recoil. A few tweaks to a standard-issue laser rifle can add burning damage over time, or split the beam into a shotgun-like spread. The best part is that those changes aren’t just tweaked numbers in the stats; nearly every modification you make is reflected in the look of your gun as well, creating an extremely varied selection of weapons both for you and for enemies.

Post-Apoca-Chic

Likewise, the new armor system lets you piece together six chunks of gear - helmet, chest plate, and each individual arm and leg - on top of your clothes to form cobbled-together, asymmetrical outfits that feel like exactly what someone who assembled their wardrobe by scavenging the wasteland should wear. The suit my character wears now has at least one piece from each major faction, reflecting both his allegiances and his victories over foes. And of course, armor can be upgraded using collected materials as well, though it sadly doesn’t have as dramatic a cosmetic effect as with weapons.

The armor system suffers from some inconsistency: several times I was a little bit heartbroken to find a new outfit like a tuxedo or a Halloween costume, but couldn’t use them as the foundation of a new custom-built look. Only certain jumpsuits can have pauldrons and shin guards strapped onto them, it seems, and no distinction is made in the item description.